By: Susan Clark Armstrong ––
2016 taught me that polls can be wrong. However, since we have had numerous polls in the Clay County race for sheriff that showed about the same results, I’m going with it. It appears Darryl “Lover Boy” Daniels is in first place. Daniels, our incumbent sheriff, is under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement because he illegally had his pregnant girlfriend arrested for stalking to cover his assets with his wife. I credit name recognition; he sure has that.
In close second place is 28-year law enforcement veteran Michelle Cook, who retired from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (JSO), became the Chief-of-Police at Atlantic Beach and left to run for Clay’s Sheriff. Third is Law Enforcement Officer Ben Carroll, a well-respected 38-year law enforcement veteran who recently retired from the Clay County Sheriff’s Office. Way down in the single digits, in spitting distance of zero, is former law enforcement officer Harold Rutledge and Mike Taylor, former FDLE officer, former realtor and now investigator with the St. Johns County State Attorney’s Office. Rutledge and Taylor are embraced in a dance for 4th and 5th place, while each take turns leading. In last place is former military policewoman, now corrections officer Catherine Webb.
If the FDLE finishes their year-long investigation before our election on August 18, our Sheriff may be in the pokey, or at least out of a job. Candidate Mike Taylor seems to be counting on the pokey, along with some imaginative campaign strategies to take a flying leap up to Michelle Cook. While Taylor may get an A+ for creativity and aplomb, he gets an F for accuracy, logic and timing.
Taylor ran for sheriff in 2008 against Sheriff Rick Beseler. He lost, but he still carried over his favorite campaign tactic to this election, “anonymous” mail-outs that use informational nothing burgers dressed up in innuendos, half-truths and things he must have pulled out of his nether regions. The mail-outs were so anonymous that a nose-blind cat could follow the trail back to Taylor.
According to Taylor’s campaign speeches and materials, in the last election and in this one also, one of his most remarkable qualifications for being our sheriff is that he has been married only once and to the same woman for 33 years. In 2008, he sent out anonymous, yet vital, mailers alerting voters that Sheriff Rick Beseler’s long-time wife had once been married to someone else before she married Beseler. His first anonymous mail-out in this election was that Michelle Cook had once been married to someone, who wrote a bad check…decades ago. Obviously, if you are divorced Mike Taylor does NOT want your vote.
It appears Taylor has moved his anonymous missives from the US mail to the internet. To clearly understand how Mr. Taylor earned his creative A+, one needs only to “follow the money.”
Campaign reports show candidate Taylor paid Diverse New Media (DNM) $2,750 for “advertising.” The owner of DNM is Javier Manjarres, a blogger from Ft. Lauderdale who is well-known for his “pay-to-play advertising.” In short, if you pay him, he will write whatever you want on his blog. Some folks in South Florida say Manjarres “dishes dirt.”
(Some in North Florida say the same about me, but at least my dirt is accurate.)
Manjarres’ trustworthiness has also been questioned because of a series of unfortunate events. He ran unsuccessfully for congress, was charged with attempted murder after he beat up a guy then proceed to shoot-up his truck. He was arrested for domestic violence, burglary with assault, and was sued for erroneously accusing a political candidate of lying about his military service.
After Manjarres received Taylor’s money, he predictably wrote a blog on May 12 about a candidate running for sheriff way up in North Florida. The title of his blog was “Chief Michelle Cook accused of falsely arresting black Navy Veteran.” The alleged arrestee was Derek Cashaw. Mike Taylor’s campaign copied the blog, which appeared to be a news story, began sending it out in the early morn, then posted the story all over his social media and any other site that would paste it.
I read Manjarres’ blog, along with police reports about the incident and public records about individuals involved. It appears Manjarres is suffering from cranio-rectal inversion. I don’t think I have ever witnessed as many inconsistencies in succession as those in Manjarres blog since I found a pair of red panties, that certainly were not mine, stuffed in-between the seat of my boyfriend’s red Corvette.
If you care to take a ride through reality, click here for the actual incident report written by Officer C.P. Crosby. To save you some time, here is a synopsis of the Manjarres /Taylor story and the clear points of inconsistency:
Mr. M wrote the incident happened in 2012. It happened in 2014. He quotes Cashaw as saying he was arrested in front of his wife and daughter. He had neither a wife or daughter at the park. The report says only his girlfriend arrived later on the scene. The report shows there were at least three others officers at the scene, besides Cook. Manjarres wrote that Cook arrested Cashaw, but Cashaw himself said she left the scene midway through the incident. After Cook departed, Cashaw was placed in an officer’s car to “calm down.” He was never arrested. Public records show Cashaw’s only arrest was in Jacksonville in 2011, when he was charged with Battery and Causing Bodily Harm to his son. The blogger wrote that when Cashaw went down to the police station to get a copy of the incident report, he saw a picture of Cook on the wall identifying her as The Chief of Police. Cook was a JSO officer. JSO had no “Chief of Police,” then or now. Cook became Chief of Police at Atlantic Beach after she retired from the JSO several years later. Manjarres was correct on two points: Cashaw was black and had been in the Navy.
Manjarres said he reached out to Cook’s campaign for a comment, but did not hear back. The Cook campaign said he contacted them after the blog was released by the Taylor campaign and they provided him a response.
Eighteen days passed after Taylor’s campaign had posted Manjarres’ story about Cook. In the early hours of May 30th, peaceful protests against the murder of George Floyd were turning into some of worst violence and racial tension that Jacksonville has seen since the 60’s. Business storefronts were being smashed and police cars were vandalized as one officer was stabbed and others injured.
At the same moment Jacksonville officers were struggling to keep peace and protect lives and property, the following race-baiting Tweet showed up on my Twitter. It appears to have been first tweeted on May 17 at 3:07pm, but it popped up on my Twitter feed at 6:35pm. I took the following picture.
I checked out the news source. It appears to be a bogus site that posts random stories. They invite you to follow other sources “Similar to News Break.” One is called “Sheena Strummer” complete with a boudoir photo, bookended with handcuffs, of a redhead with considerable cleavage. The site describes itself as FatDominatrixxx, Boudoir, Fetish, and Pin-up Photographer, Punk a*s B*t*h. I added the asterisks because I was embarrassed.
Another blog appeared on June 4 on Taylor’s social media sites and several local social media sites proclaiming: “Internal investigation of Michelle Cook disappears from her file.” He suggests there is a conspiracy by the JSO to protect Cook. Cashaw actually filed a complaint against all the officers at the scene, however Manjarres never mentioned anyone but Cook.
While Taylor has certainly gotten his money’s worth from Manjarres, the fact remains that there are three categories of complaints: Sustained, Unsustained and Unfounded. Cashaw’s complaints were investigated by JSO and were deemed unfounded. “Unfounded” means there was no validity to the complaint. According to JSO mandates, anything that is unfounded is purged after three years. It has been six.
America guarantees free speech so that people can talk about “public figures” including candidates. (Lucky for me.) Citizens, other candidates or “Political Action Committees” can run advertisements that are misleading or false. Even libel laws do not require political advertisers to be factual. Consequently, Taylor can say anything he wants about Cook without any regard to the truth. But Taylor’s campaigning tactics reminds me of something Judge Judy says on occasion.
“Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”
It’s my job to tell you this. It is not raining. Mike Taylor is just peeing on the legs of all of us in Clay County because he wants to be our sheriff.
I reached out to Mike Taylor personally seven times for a comment before this blog was released. He did not answer and did not return my messages.
